Book contents
- On Style in Victorian Fiction
- On Style in Victorian Fiction
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 On Style: An Introduction
- Part I Aspects of Style
- Chapter 2 Novel Poetics: Three Studies in the Craft of Style
- Chapter 3 Not Straightforward: Characteristics of the Psychology of Grammar in the Victorian Realist Novel
- Chapter 4 Why Always Dorothea? The Rhetorical Question in Canon and Archive
- Chapter 5 Victorian Transport
- Chapter 6 Telegraphy
- Part II Authors
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - Not Straightforward: Characteristics of the Psychology of Grammar in the Victorian Realist Novel
from Part I - Aspects of Style
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2021
- On Style in Victorian Fiction
- On Style in Victorian Fiction
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 On Style: An Introduction
- Part I Aspects of Style
- Chapter 2 Novel Poetics: Three Studies in the Craft of Style
- Chapter 3 Not Straightforward: Characteristics of the Psychology of Grammar in the Victorian Realist Novel
- Chapter 4 Why Always Dorothea? The Rhetorical Question in Canon and Archive
- Chapter 5 Victorian Transport
- Chapter 6 Telegraphy
- Part II Authors
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter considers the unobtrusive words, the conjunctions, and the grammar of Victorian realist prose, drawing on examples from Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Anthony Trollope. The styles of Victorian realist fiction are shown to lodge within their very grammar a psychology of style; they register in the turns and returns of their sentences, in their ‘forms of retardation, inference, and backwards-reappraisal’, thinking and reflection from within the midst of narrated experience.
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- On Style in Victorian Fiction , pp. 41 - 57Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022